


Lazy Mornings, Fried Eggs, and Being a Foot Shorter Than Your Wife

by OxfordOctopus



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adopted Teddy Lupin, Bill can double as a skyrise, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Genderfluid Teddy Lupin, Ginny is tall and clingy, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Harry is short, Lazy Mornings, Morning Cuddles, Ron takes side work as a telephone pole, Short Harry Potter, Tall Ginny Weasley, Teddy is powerful and likes skirts more than shorts but they can do either, and loud, fear him, just... people bein cozy, molly doesn't count since she married in, no drama here, the entire weasley clan has not a single member below 6ft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 22:10:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20181520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: Harry stopped growing taller in his fourth year. Nobody was really quite sure why - though if you'd ask the man himself he was pretty sure it came down to his less-than-ideal relationship with nutrition and the handful of unrecognized curses that had hit him during Voldemort's resurrection - but, one way or the other, it was neither reversible nor particularly something to worry about. Fleur hadn't called him a 'leetle boy' for no reason, after all; he'd barely gotten to five foot before he stopped growing.Harry knew he wasn't tall or chiseled or even particularly manly, and yet, honestly?Both him and Ginny are pretty alright with that.Well, she's more than alright with it, if the teasing was any indication.





	Lazy Mornings, Fried Eggs, and Being a Foot Shorter Than Your Wife

Hazy half-dreams clouded Harry’s vision as he woke, a thrum of nonsense that swam uncomfortably through his head. He’d always had trouble coming out of dreams, even as a child, the memories of them always ghosting along his skin, refusing to be brushed off, to be anything but _real_. It hadn’t been helped by being connected to Voldemort either, only further collapsing the barriers between the ill-remembered fantasies his mind got up to when he slept, to the point where he’d developed a bad habit of sleepwalking during his eighth year at Hogwarts, or at least walking around bewildered as to why his trunk wasn’t some mythical creature or another.

Arms tightened around Harry’s shoulders, another body shifting against his, encircling him. A waspish, too-tired groan escaped him before he could stop it, his eyes fluttering open as he did, taking in the relative gloom of the bedroom. The shadows made up faces for a moment, shifting bodies and arms outstretched towards him, pulsating bizarrely before his mind finally snapped back into the present, the cotton blanket of sleep yanked away like a recoiling rubberband. The shadows returned to being shadows, the blankets no longer snow, the sky covered with a roof and the room being palpably absent of the hydra-sphinx-ox chimaera which had been singing some operatic verse up until recently.

“Gin,” the word came out raspy, thick with sleep. The arms that encircled Harry tightened down, pulled him in closer as one thigh pinned both of his legs to the bed and his back to her chest. “S’morning, Gin. Le’ggo.”

She didn’t.

Harry writhed against the touch, trying to wiggle out of being the little spoon - though to be fair he was never the big spoon, being a foot shorter than your partner tends to do that - and not getting very far. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, and they tended to end up either like this - with Gin hugging his back, nose buried near his neck - or with him pinned facing towards her, but it still didn’t mean he particularly liked being unable to get up and start his routine.

A tentative lick across the back of his teeth made him grimace. Yeah, he needed to get out but, again, any attempt to writhe only rewarded him with a tighter squeeze. What was she? A Devil’s Snare?

“Gin.”

She murmured, finally, burying her head even harder against his shoulder.

“Ginny.”

“Nnrgh.”

Harry, with the determination he’d come to develop over his time doing stupid shit as an adolescent, jammed his heel back in hopes of hitting her shin.

He hit her knee.

“Ow!”

_Well, at least that was satisfying_. Wiggling again and rearing his foot forward in an unspoken promise, Ginny was all of a sudden rather eager to let him go. The duvet shifted, Harry absconded quickly from her grasp - as well as the tangled blankets - and promptly landed face-down on the hardwood floor.

Ginny choked back a laugh, the cheeky bitch.

“Oh, shut up.” He wasn’t sulking.

Stumbling to his knees, then to a stand, Harry arched his spine and stretched his arms over his head, pulling out the knots in his shoulders and elbows with a breathy sort of groan. It felt good to stretch, the fact that the noises his body was making would make Ginny grimace was just the icing on top, really. A particularly good pop in his spine drew out a quiet “eugh” from his wife, and he relished it as the small, bitter victory it absolutely was.

“You want the shower? I showered last night, so I’m fine.”

“No, m’going back to sleep.”  
  
Harry glanced back and let loose his best imitation of Hermione’s ‘aren’t you forgetting something?’ half-glare, half-’if you are, I’ll bury you’ expression. Gin stared back, blinking rather owlishly as she realized she was, in fact, forgetting something. A sheepish expression eventually slid over the confused one and Ginny’s eyes shot to the bedspread, her head ducked.

“We’re taking Teddy to see Fleur, Bill and their kids,” Harry finally explained, pacing towards the bathroom as he did. “For lunch _and_ dinner, by the way.”

“Oh, shite, er, right.”

“Mmhm.”

The bathroom lit up, soap bubble-like globes of floating glass filling in with a very pale gold-white light, a variant of Lumos no doubt. Reaching the faucet, Harry stared at his reflection for just a moment before clicking the mirror open, the cabinet swinging to the side and letting him access his bottom shelf. Some toothpaste, a toothbrush, and a decidedly unfriendly relationship with dry mouth later, Harry spit twice into the sink, checked with his tongue to make sure everything was clean, and then slid back out into the bedroom.

Ginny was finally up, her sleepwear messily discarded at the foot of their bed and her body half-submerged in that narnia-esque wardrobe of hers. Harry swiped up the night clothes, chucked them into the vanishing hamper - because, seriously, whoever decided to reincorporate vanishing closet enchantments into daily household items should be _sainted_ for their duty towards mankind - and went about rummaging through what shirts and shorts he had on-hand.

“Is it casual?” Her voice was tinged by the magic in her closet, sounding a bit like if an echo could happen just milliseconds after the noise itself. “Or formal? I don’t want to show up the French, you know?”

Harry rolled his eyes, plucking a pale yellow shirt free, pairing it with some black denim trousers and a pair of plain grey trainers. “If it’s not casual then they’ll just have to cope with me _being_ casual,” Harry called back, lifting his baggy shirt from his torso and managing to pitch it cleanly into the vanishing hamper.

Ginny’s head reappeared from her wardrobe, glancing first towards his clothes and then towards him. “Yellow seems nice,” she managed, vanishing back into it. “It is late spring, so I think I can dress for heat.”

“We have warming charms if not, you know?”

“You’ll have to cast it if I need it.”

Harry shot a glare at the wardrobe. “Why’s that?”

Ginny popped back out, what looked to be a rich yellow shirt and a few other articles of clothing draped over her shoulder. “Because I’m lazy, we’ve been over this before.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“Is so.”

Harry huffed, sliding first into his jeans, then into his shirt, which hung rather comfortably over his frame. A quick glance at the full-length mirror - (“Looking good, maybe work on the hair.” “Ginny, didn’t we get someone to fix the mirror’s obsession with my hair?” “No, Harry, it always says that because it’s always right.”) - resulting in him begrudgingly reaching for his comb shortly thereafter, smoothing his snarly, tangly bush into something at least a touch more presentable.

Harry paced out of their bedroom, down the hallway - making sure to flick the lights on all the while - before finally entering the kitchen. It was one of the better fixtures of the sometimes maze-like house they’d bought, being separated from the main dining and living area by the hallway that led to the rooms and a pair of wide, tall archways. It gave it an open feeling, in contrast to the narrow hallways that crisscrossed the two additional floors above it as well as the area just behind it.

On the wall, a broad Prewett clock hung, shaped out of interwoven branches and vine-like mesh. It was about seven forty five, which wasn’t bad, but also wasn’t nearly as early as he’d wanted to be up. He’d have to wake Teddy in about thirty minutes, and let it be known that while Ginny was a heavy sleeper, the four year old was something else. Harry would be lucky if he could wrangle the kid into decent shape in an hour after that, and by that point they’d still need to feed and water them, do the daily chores, and be ready to Floo by eleven-thirty at the latest.

Harry lit the stove, grabbed some eggs out of the coldbox, and some bread from the pantry, pausing only to recharge the preservation charm that hadn’t been properly connected to the rest of the house’s ward system. Toast went into the toaster - and it was a rather big relief that wizards even had toasters, he’d hate doing this all by pan - eggs into the skillet. Harry flicked the wireless on for good measure, the radio picking up on a half-finished jazzy song by one of the more recent muggleborn music groups that had started feeling confident enough to publish music entirely inspired by muggle artists - including pop music, something that had been a rather happy surprise - and only muggle artists.

Arms draped themselves around Harry, pinning him - for the third time, he should mention - in place while he tended to the eggs, nudging them with the flat metal spatula in his hand. Ginny was, and always would be, a particularly physical person, not that Harry minded much at all. He _liked_ touching Ginny, liked her hugs and the way she brushed shoulders with him, all the little things his mind needed to be reminded that she was still there, that someone was. It was just... Ginny was tall. Taller than average by a wide margin, a six foot tower of freckles and ginger hair and domineering presence.

Harry, comparatively, was five foot flat. He stopped growing in his fourth year, though nobody had noticed it at the time, and there wasn’t really a way to fix the issue when someone did pick up on the fact near the end of his fifth year. Medical examinations couldn’t put heads or tails as to why he just stopped growing, but if you were to ask him, his bet was on his unhealthy relationship with nutrition and the handful of unnamed curses that he’d been pelted with during Voldemort’s revival.

It wasn’t even really just his height that had fucked off to presumably help Ron push those last two inches into his already six-foot-three-inch frame, it was also his complexion and puberty itself. To be candid, he did _develop_, but he never really got body hair or even much in the way of facial hair. His puberty had been slow to start to begin with - picking up when he was twelve or thirteen instead of nine or ten - and when Fleur had called him ‘_A leetle boy_’, she wasn’t particularly _wrong_. He was short for a fourth year, short and baby-faced and if not for his scar he was pretty sure he could’ve passed as precocious second year or a slow-to-start third year, but not a fourth year.

As far as anyone could tell, though, his body had just decided it was done growing. So he was left as he was, five foot with an androgynous face that would hopefully harden with age, but with no guarantees. Hell, Malfoy had come out of his teenage years looking more like a guy than he did, and it’d become rather something of a reputation for him. He was used to being small, used to being looked down on for his appearance and mannerisms, and as a consequence a lot of the well-intentioned, though nevertheless backhanded comments rarely bothered him. However, it still didn’t mean that people didn’t hold it over him, if you’d pardon the pun.

Which, speaking of.

“Can you get the plates?” Harry glanced up, and then up, and then up, and only when his head was twisted at a somewhat painful angle did he catch Ginny’s downturned, half-pouty expression. He’d clearly been ignoring her too much if she was starting to act like a particularly needy cat to get his attention.

“What? Can’t reach them yourself?”

“Unless you want your eggs to burn, no, I’d need my wand.”

The plates were retrieved in short order and with no complaint, what with the threat of no food hanging in the air.

Filling Ginny’s plate with three eggs and two pieces of toast and his with one egg smothered between two pieces of toast, Harry plopped the plates down onto the dining table and took a seat in those god awful magic-immune wooden chairs that Ron had forced on him. Oh, they were pretty, and Ginny refused to bin them because they matched the table, but Harry was pretty damn sure this was all one long-term protracted joke of Hermione’s, what with how she was the one who ended up accidentally making them to begin with.

Ginny, as Ginny was ought to do, went into her plate with an eagerness equal to Ron but without Ron’s eating habits, while Harry took some time with his egg sandwich. Aside from the clinking of plates and the occasional shout of foul-mouthed gnomes in the lawn - since as it turns out the infestation of vulgar gnomes were a consequence of a curse some Malfoy cast on the Weasleys in the late eighteen hundreds - the world was quiet and rather peaceful.

If only it could be like this most of the time. Harry rarely had peace, in a manner of speaking. He’d started as an auror just after the war, but after Andromeda fell ill - again - and then died shortly thereafter, Harry had dropped his job to take over full-time as Teddy’s caretaker. It had been a rough few months to begin with - Teddy had just lost the majority of their family in an incredibly short amount of time and simply did not understand what was going on - especially due to the need to work out visitation days, now that the post-war trials had taken place and Narcissa had come out of it largely unscathed, alongside Draco. Harry hadn’t really trusted her to begin with, wasn’t sure what to make of her when she’d come asking to visit Teddy on occasion, but he’d given her a few trial runs and it became obvious rather quickly that the woman was just trying to cherish what was left over of her family, Draco aside.

It’d also taken a while - or, rather, had taken until Teddy was old enough to understand - that Harry wasn’t their father. That had been a rough conversation, in all honesty, and one that had hurt him hard as well. He’d felt guilty about letting Teddy call him dad, felt like he was taking up the place where Remus - or a decidedly adventurous Tonks - would be, and so he’d tried to put a stop to it, not that it mattered in the end. Teddy had taken the fact that he wasn’t their biological father with the gusto expected of a four year old and had simply, if not in those words, told him to get bent and that he was their father regardless. It had made him cry in the aftermath, which was telling, but they’d settled back into it nonetheless.

Ginny was also doing pretty good as Teddy’s mom, if he was being honest. Not that he’d ever say it so directly - not unless absolutely necessary - the woman had more than enough hot air in her head after beating his snitch catch time a few months back. She’d lorded it over him so often that he’d been tempted to try and reclaim it, but he hadn’t really quite managed to get back on a broom and get into the game again. It’d felt shallow, unnecessary, in the grand scheme of things, and he’d felt like taking care of Teddy and making sure wizarding politics didn’t backslide right back into the problems that lead to Tom Riddle’s rise to begin with was more important.

“Hon?” Ginny’s voice drew him back out of his thoughts, his mouth paused just over the remainder of his egg sandwich. Swallowing what was already in there, Harry shot a curious look at her, hoping she’d continue.

She did. “I’m going to go and Floo over to the Burrow for a bit, just to grab some things.” Ginny rose, walking over to the sink and placing the plate gently down into it, apparently still overly gentle with it after the last broken glass incident. “You okay with getting Teddy up? I know they do better with me.”

“Oh. Yeah, sure. Be safe, alright?”

Ginny flashed him an almost blinding smile. “Always.”

Then she was gone.

Harry grunted, dropped the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, cleaned his plate off, cleaned his hands, and then gave himself another laborious, oh-so-pleasurable stretch. Some part of him, the part that had been honed from growing up in an abusive household and in an environment that hadn’t ever truly been safe for him, knew that today would be, if nothing else, a pleasant day. He wasn’t sure why he knew - he wasn’t about to go claiming Divination, not unless he started seeing dogs or dog-adjacent shapes in his tea - but some part of him simply _did_.

Now, though?

Now he had to wake up a little metamorphmagus with a predilection towards highly focused - and often times painful - accidental - though Harry was starting to have his doubts on just how accidental it was - magic.


End file.
